Tag Archives: Notify

If you have spent months drafting out your latest marketing campaign and carefully choosing the perfect and most incisive language to draw your customer in to the merits of your company, there is nothing more deflating than your e-mail being unceremoniously overlooked by the intended viewer.

Our latest additions are:

Developer Defined Variables : We have been asked by many App and game developers to increase the number of developer defined app variables. So we have. This mean you can have a mix of triggers from both the level/sub-level and variables accessed by the player. These variable may be items collected within the game or clicks used within an app. Basically anything that the user does, you can track and may a push notification for. The management of the app variables has now been given its own section of the developer user interface.

Upversion Push Notifications : The plugin now reports on the game version which installed on the phone. In IOS 7, the phone automatically up versions the applications which reduces the players visibility of what is new in the app. So we can now send a push notification describing the new features for that version.

Click Through Statistics : The push notification click through support has been added to measure the click through rate of your push notifications. This will be reported to you in the analytics menu within the developer panel.

Certificates Management : The method of uploading and changing the demonstration and production certificates has been streamlined. This is now under the games menu. This allows you to add, modify and delete certificates for both Apple and Android.

Notify is based around the concept of ‘recipes’, a system that controls the frequency with which tailor-made notifications are sent to users, usually in the guise of cheat codes. This ‘context aware’ system places the needs of each single gamer above everything else and optimises their in-game engagement, providing an effective key to unlocking the increasingly fractured relationship that companies now have with their consumers, and re-awakening an invaluable trust between the two parties.

The majority of game developers just about create a marketing plan, so developing a game push notification strategy is just one step too far.

why should you?

There are two reasons: player retention and monetization.

The app stores have hundreds of thousands of games, with thousands coming onto the store every day. So the first biggest step for any developer is to develop and implement a marketing strategy which ensures people download your game. This is normally done with a mixture of social media and in/out of game promotional marketing. The business model for advertising is such that you pay for click throughs. This are a few steps away from players, so from click throughs we have viewing store page, then downloads, opening the application and finally players. Each step means less people.

Once that person has downloaded the game and playing it, then the developers monetization strategy kicks in. This is normally based on some game tunings and designing which we did back in the studio, some months ago. However, developing a strategy for a casual game which works for a 16 year old and a 96 year old is also
impossible, especially as an indie game developer.

New data from analytics firm App Annie shows the growing strength of freemium apps. Freemium app revenue has quadrupled over the last two years, and freemium apps now generate 69% of the world’s iOS app revenue and 75% of global Android app revenues. In contrast, the premium app market has shown little to no revenue growth over the same period. The average revenue per download for paid apps is higher on iPad than on iPhone in the Apple App Store in the U.S.: $4.04 versus $2.25, respectively.

However, its been proven that we need to get our players to around 60% through the game until we can truly monetization the game. This means we need to “nudge” them forward to get the full immersion of the game.

How do we nudge them forward?

dojit has been thinking about this and come up with a number of tools, the first two being, game treats and dojit-notify.

Game Treats are codes which a player enters to get something extra in the game. They can be communicated through the game or via push notifications, social media or via the web site. In fact any way the developer feels it best with their target demographic. http://developer.dojit.com/game-treats/

dojit-notify allows developers to create a series of recipes which when triggered sends players context aware notifications through the push notification services. Context aware notifications get higher rates of awareness and application usage, which increase player retention which drives revenue within the game .

The push notifications should be part of generating a community which your player can feel part of without constant series of notifications. Therefore it is important to plan who gets what and when and how this fits into the entire communication strategy for both the business and also the game.

In summary push notifications increase player retention which drives revenue. Using out of game notifications to bring players back to game after periods of time is important in maintaining and building your player base. In game notifications also engage players with context aware messages to nudge them forward. By using automatical scheduled context aware notifications, with developer defined rules you can launch your game knowing your work is done.

When is best to create a game push notification strategy?

When you are designing the game, though needs to be put into the monetization points. These points are clear goals within the game and therefore measuring how many payers are before, on or after these points is an important first step. From here you can create strategies around these points which nudge players forward or notifications to bring players back into the game.

dojit-notify has been created to be used during the development, launch and post launch cycles of game development. The service is free up until launch. Take a look at http://developer.dojit.com/ .

We interviewed Joss on his experience’s working with dojit and asked about him about his ambitions, oh and some geeky questions some of you would like!

Where did you first hear about the Dojit games?

I first heard about the company when looking for game jobs online. I saw a Unity game developer internship advertised on Internwise, so I sent an application and was lucky enough to be invited to work at Dojit for 2 months!

Was working as a game developer always something you wanted to do?

I think I knew that I wanted to work in video games ever since I got the original playstation with crash bandicoot 3 when I was about 10 years old.

Has working with dojit helped you further your knowledge of game development? If so in what way?

Working at Dojit has definitely helped me further my knowledge, I feel like I’m a much more competent programmer now. It was great to be able to work full time in game development, doing it everyday really improved skills.

Did you play mobile games before joining dojit? If so which ones?

To be honest I haven’t played any mobile games recently as I still haven’t made the move to a smart phone! However I’m a big fan of plants vs zombies and spent a lot of time playing it on my iPod touch in the past.

Which game studio would you love to work for and why?

I’m a bit of a Nintendo fan boy so I’d love to work for their first party development team Intelligent Systems, as they’ve made some of my favourite games like paper mario and fire emblem. It would also mean living in Japan which would be very interesting.

What game are you playing at the moment?

Currently I’m spending a lot of time digging up fossils and selling turnips in Animal Crossing: New Leaf for the 3DS, it’s brilliant!

Mario or Sonic?

It has to be Mario!

PC or Consoles?

I prefer playing most games on my PC as I like to be able to push the graphics further than the current consoles can. That will probably change as soon as the next gen consoles are out and the graphics card in my PC is out classed.

iOS or Android?

After working on Chicken Strike I have found Android to be much easier to develop for than IOS, so for that reason I would have to say Android

David Bozward, Dojit’s CEO “Chicken Strike has been an opportunity to get together students from Hertfordshire University who have created the graphics, Joss Harris and up and coming developer, to provide a learning environment for them to create a new title. Joss has done a fantastic job in getting the title ready in less than two months. “

We like to work with the next generation of developers, the industries future.

First of all, what are ‘Indie Games’? They are small groups or individual game developers without the financial support of a video game publisher to create independent games. They work from home, basement, rent rooms or if lucky rented office space.

Indie games started on PC back in the 1990’s, known as shareware. Which had small independent companies become huge leading game development studios such as Epic Games and id Software. Gamers were given the chance to try games like Demonsgate, before investing money in them and in return gave those companies exposure.

Fast forward to mid 2000’s with the launch of Steam and Xbox 360 we saw the number of indie games rise. Games like Fez, Braid and many other games were released and were critically acclaimed, some even the best game’s in their genre. Thanks to Microsoft’s Xbox Live Arcade development tools and Adobe flash let developers create and sell their games on their desired platforms.

We will continue to see the rise of indie games in the next generation console’s, especially on the PlayStation 4. Sony took to the stage at E3 in Los Angeles and showcased a myriad of indie games. Games like Transistor from the makers of smash hit Bastion was shown off. They gave the developers time to be on stage and talk about their games and vision. This is rare publicity on the big stage at E3 been given to indie publishers, you would normally see a larger presence of indie developers at Penny Arcade Expo. This shows where the industry is going and the support companies like Sony, Valve and in the past Microsoft is giving to these up and coming developers.